Saturday, January 3, 2009

Comprehensive review of fundamental neuroscience research shows that a human brain selects Brands like Google selects websites. Therefore our brain might just be retrieving information useing some sort of Pagerank. These findings will be published in the December issue of Journal of Brand Management.

"Brand choice turns out to be a largely unconscious process," says Tjaco Walvis, who led the one-and-a-half-year study. "But in that process, the brain behaves much like Google. It seems to use a set of rules called an algorithm to pick the brand from our memory that best and most reliably fits our functional and emotional needs at that particular moment. It behaves rationally, but in an unconscious way."

The study applied fundamental Neuroscience to branding, instead of the more common fMRI. The study examines processes at the cell level in the customer's brain as it decides which brands it prefers. The study also adds to existing research that contends that conventional views on brand choice are outdated and can be misleading.

Walvis states that the brain's "algorithm" for brand choice has three elements:

The brain selects the brand it has learned is best able to satisfy our biological and cultural goals

The brain selects the brand that has shown most frequently in the past that it is able to fulfill these needs.

The brain selects the brand it has interacted with most intensely in the past.

The result off the studies can mean that search engine marketing can be taken to the next level. It could mean that marketers can more efficiently target specific consumers but it can also mean consumers can more easily figure out the way marketers are trying to pursuede them to buy the offered products.

Last year the University of California came to a similar conclusion, as was reported in the NewScientist. This research seems to confirm the Universities findings, using a different kind of research method.